Diagrams in Robert Stark's proposal for the Warehouse District show the rough massing of the buildings he'd like to build. He hasn't hired architects yet to design any individual projects. Blue indicates office space, yellow is retail and red is housing and hotel space.

Cleveland can be a tough place to sell big new ideas in real estate and urban development.

It's easy to see why. None of the major projects of the past two decades, from the Gateway sports complex to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, has reversed the city's decline. The medical mart proposed for the city hasn't materialized, despite the new sales tax imposed by Cuyahoga County two months ago to pay for it.

This history could breed a certain cynicism. But that doesn't mean that all new proposals, even those requiring hefty infusions of public money, ought to be gunned down on sight.

On the contrary, Cleveland needs all the big ideas it can get.

It's in this spirit that Cleveland developer Robert Stark, famous locally for Crocker Park, his faux-downtown lifestyle center in suburban Westlake, ought to get a full and fair hearing for his "Big Bang" concept to revitalize downtown.

Stark revealed the latest iteration of his 2-year-old concept in an interview last week. The discussion was part of Stark's newest push to bring his proposal to fruition.

His idea is to fill all or part of eight blocks of the Warehouse District, now dominated by parking lots, with $1.5 billion in new construction. The project would comprise 3.2 million square feet, including a million square feet of street-level retail, 1.2 million square feet of office space and a million square feet of residential units and hotels.

That's enough space to house 4,800 to 5,200 office workers and an additional 2,200 to 2,500 workers in retail, plus 2,000 new downtown residents. The first segment, Block A, would open in 2011.

Stark's theory is that the only way to attract office tenants and national retailers en masse is to provide the instant critical mass that comes from building a single, large urban project quickly, rather than letting the Cleveland market move at the usual glacial pace.

A single developer can attract a network of stores that support one another with traffic, as in a suburban shopping mall. A developer can also coordinate housing, parking, hotels or other uses to support the whole.

DALE OMORI / THE PLAIN DEALER

Robert Stark has earned attention locally for large lifestyle centers such Crocker Park, an instant downtown in Westlake, a city that never had a center until Stark's project came along.

This is not a new idea. It's what Stark did at Crocker Park, a $420 million, 1.6 million-square-foot project. What's new is that Cleveland developers, Stark included, are applying similar methods of coordinated leasing and large-scale preservation or redevelopment to entire chunks of the city.

Rick and Ari Maron assembled scores of individual pieces of property to make possible their widely hailed redevelopment of East Fourth Street downtown.

Scott Wolstein plans to redevelop 13 acres on the East Bank of the Flats. Nathan Zaremba and the Marons are developing the $300 million Triangle project in University Circle, where they plan to put housing and retail next to new buildings for the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland and the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Wolstein, Zaremba and the Marons have won plenty of praise for using the same approach Stark now wants to use in the Warehouse District. But Stark faces an uphill fight, because he's a relative newcomer to the city.

Still, his ideas and timing seem right for Cleveland. Some background: Dumb as it now seems, the city bulldozed half of the 170 buildings in the neighborhood in the 1970s to make way for parking lots to support the brutally oversized Justice Center, completed in 1976, which serves both the city of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County.

Since then, preservationists and developers have slowly renovated the remaining, beautiful 19th-century buildings in the district, just west of Public Square, with loft apartments, restaurants and offices.

The painfully slow process of filling the ugly parking lots with new buildings has started. Stark, who has assembled roughly 30 acres in the district in partnership with others (including parking-lot owner T.J. Asher), wants to speed things up.

"Left half-done, it's a desolation," he says.

He argues that a "Big Bang" will create the impetus to extend the downtown grid north across the lakefront railroad tracks to Dock 20 at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, now used by the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority to store piles of gravel and cement silos, hardly the highest and best use of the property.

"The most important thing is to extend the city grid to the lake," Stark says.

STARK ENTERPRISES INC.

A page from Robert Stark's new proposal for the Warehouse District shows how he envisions extending the neighborhood grid from Superior Avenue all the way to Dock 20 on the lakefront. He'd like to get things started with his "Big Bang'' development in the heart of the Warehouse District.

Critics will no doubt say that Stark's vision is too big, that he'll never pull it off -- or that if he does, he'll hurt other parts of downtown.

For example, if he lures Eaton Corp. to a new office building in the Warehouse District, Eaton would leave behind the incredibly dull black-glass office tower it now occupies at Superior Avenue and East 12th Street. The older tower, built in 1983 and designed by what were apparently drones from the Chicago office of Skidmore Owings & Merrill, might then be hard to lease.

If Stark lures even more prestige tenants from other mediocre office towers, he could leave behind a sea of empty architectural duds in the Erieview district on the east side of downtown.

Stark says he's not playing a zero-sum game, and that vacancies created by his project would be filled by companies now located in the suburbs.

That theory is unproven. So too, for the time being, is Stark's ability to sell his vision. He says he has "very strong interest" and is getting letters of intent from major retailers and office tenants. But he has no signed leases yet.

Another uncertainty is how the upcoming 15-year reconstruction of the Inner Belt will affect all real estate ventures downtown, including Stark's. If the Ohio Department of Transportation attaches a tourniquet to the city's main highway arteries, real estate values could plummet.

Just as significant, Stark says the public improvements he'll need to complete his project would cost roughly one-third of the total, or $500 million. That's a stunning sum.

He plans to raise it in large part through tax-increment financing, in which the higher taxes from new development in the Warehouse District would pay for new streets, parking, landscaping and utilities.

The catch here is that Stark says he'd need a change in state law to capture new revenue streams from sales and income taxes. Again, critics will scoff.

MIKE LEVY / THE PLAIN DEALER

Developer Robert Stark has big ideas for downtown Cleveland. The question is whether he can sell them to office and retail tenants.

But Cleveland could clearly profit from Stark's energy and smarts. He understands, for instance, that downtown's east-west blocks, which measure roughly 600 feet, need to be cut in half with new north-south streets to create a more easily walkable city. Stark also wants the architecture of his new buildings to be contemporary, not phony imitations of the 19th century.

On paper, Stark's diagrams of the raw massing for his proposed new buildings look too big and bulky. It's bad that he hasn't included any new parks at street level.
But if he moves ahead, the development could -- and probably should -- become somewhat less dense. Or the city could allow Stark to build higher, in certain areas, in exchange for green space at street level.

The important thing now is that Stark gets a fair chance to sell his project locally and to lobby for the tax-increment financing he says he needs.

Who knows? If he and other developers succeed downtown and at University Circle, they might finally justify all the big public investments made in the last two decades, such as the Rock Hall. At the very least, they all deserve a chance to try.

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